Notes:

In plain terms, the Madrigal family deals with grief. Spoilers- Mirabel and Bruno have always been in love.

Please bear with me, they have a long way to go.

Part 1

What's the Point, if You're Not There?

It took three months after the death of Abuela for Bruno to realize that he had abandoned his family to their troubles once again. It had been simple, and that horrified him.

After the rise and fall of Casita years ago, when Abuela was able to finally speak about Pedro (the man she knew and not the saint), she had said that the first couple of years after his death were the hardest. But Bruno couldn't imagine anything worse than the first couple of months after hers. It had been sudden- no illness to signal a decline and start adjusting before she was gone. Painless for Abuela, thank god. Nonsensical, cruel for everyone else.

After the impetus of her funeral, the village idled, rudderless. The air in each room was a vacuum of stunned silence, else cottoned with niceties that everyone knew were useless. What happened at all, happened guiltily behind closed doors. Who would want to break the silence after Madrigals had lost so much?

Bruno circled the house just after a grey dawn, when only the first couple of birds had begun their morning songs. Massive philodendron leaves drooped with dew. The Madrigal family still slept in their rows of rooms on the second floor and weren't due for breakfast in hours yet. Bruno was scattering small pinches of salt around the boundary- a ward to keep out misfortune, malicious energy. He quietly knocked on all of the wooden window shutters as he passed. He hoped it helped, because it felt like all he could do.

Bruno had experienced enough tense silence, even after his decade of isolation, to know that he had grown no better at navigating high stakes conversations with people. Bruno said the wrong things, or the right things when it was too late. A joke when sympathy was due. The opposite.

"It's not like it was unexpected, at her age-" he had told Madame Guzman, approximately the same age.

Pepa returned about fifteen novels she had borrowed over the years from Abuela to her now unoccupied room. Bruno, trying for levity, remarked that at least Abuela couldn't collect any late fees. He had to apologize over and over, and individually dry each page of the water-damaged books at Casita's stove.

At the funeral, his family had clung to each other in the pews while he fiddled with stray threads on his ruana, feeling a sham. It was just that he'd had a lot longer to mourn.

So it had been easy to slip away. Bruno had decades of practice living with his head down, watching his feet travel pace by pace on the same path. At least this one was outdoors.

In Abuela's death, he had lost another tether to the family. His sisters each had their own families to see to, and a tangle of interpersonal relationships between them. Bruno pivoted around them, sustaining himself on the murmurings of those families, the sounds of work in the kitchens and laundry room. The salt was a wish more than anything. A spell of sorts for the family fortune, just as he had once mended the walls.

All of this to say, when Bruno turned the corner and found Mirabel tucked between a palm tree and the walls of the Casita, his first feeling was panic. Not here, he thought. Not with someone as important as Mirabel.

Bruno cursed himself for being careless. He knew this hiding place. He and his sisters had discovered it as teenagers when trying to smoke. Bruno remembered how the acrid pang of Ica Mazinga mingled with the scent of begonias, dispersing off the palm fronds above. It felt like everyone was older than them, then. Bruno took a step back, hoping for a hasty retreat.

A fallen palm frond crunched beneath his feet and Mirabel's eyes snapped up to him.

Well, so much for that.

Bruno was a little glad of it, really. He could imagine the guilt later if he didn't even spare a nod to the first family he imposed on in weeks.

"Hi there!" Bruno said, hating the chipper way it came off. He grabbed his arm and tried not to glance over his shoulder too obviously.

"Hi. Um, occupied?' Mirabel said, attempting to smile.

Dried tears had made tracks down the sides of her cheeks. Her skirt seemed rumpled, slept in, and she didn't seem to mind that her heel was grinding a corner of it into the dirt.

"What are you doing here so early?" Bruno was unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice. Shouldn't she be asleep? Or commiserating with the rest of Julieta's family? He belatedly realized the insensitiveness of his question. It was pretty clear she had stolen away to mourn in private, where no one was likely to overhear her.

"Sorry. Crying, right?"

Mirabel hiccoughed and nodded. She covered her face with her hands, as if putting everything back into place. Bruno hovered, half bent as he tried to decide whether it would be more awkward to crouch to her level or run away.

"It's fine." She said, voice reedy with strain. "Just trying to get away from-" Mirabel made a gesture around her, and then lowered her eyes, unable to continue. The family. Responsibilities, perhaps.

You and me both, kid. Bruno was intimately familiar with the instinct to hide- in large clothing, noncommittal humor, isolation.

"Wait, do you want me to also-" he realized, but Mirabel just waved her hand. He could stay.

But what did one say?

"Julieta's going to be making cuchuco for breakfast," Bruno had seen the ingredients laid out in the kitchen. Mirabel didn't respond and Bruno could kick himself for the pointless small talk, even as he continued to babble down to Mirabel's crouched form. "Nutritious. Um, hydrating. Seems like you could probably use it."

Mirabel gave him a look of skepticism plainly legible through her puffy eyes.

"Hydrating? Like a tear refill?"

"Well…" Yes, that was his thought.

Mirabel let him stew in discomfort for a half a second and then laughed, small huffs of air more than anything else. Bruno almost sagged in relief. Just teasing. Things couldn't be all that bad if she still had it in her.

"Should have seen your face…" she breathed.

Mirabel looked at him with clear eyes then. She had a way of observing a person that Bruno liked, like a beam of warm sunlight that could throw every secret into relief, smooth its edges. The expression was more like he remembered before the tragedy.

Then, inexplicably, her face sank and tears welled in the corners of her eyes.

"Oops," Mirabel said, scrubbing them with her hands. Oh no. What had Bruno done?

"Give me a moment." Mirabel buried her face in hands again, curling inwards on herself. The muscles in her back strained as she held herself together for his benefit. Bruno hated this. He wanted to say it was fine to cry, and it was! Right? Family was supposed to comfort you when you did.

He reached a hand out to her- and then hesitated. A spike of caution coursed through his veins, like the warning throb of a headache when he had tried to see too much in the future.

While it was true that family was supposed to comfort you, he'd always been terrible at it. He didn't know what to say. Never really knew how you were supposed to hug someone except in casual, jovial ways.

He'd make things worse somehow. In the silence that followed, Bruno could hear the whispers of a stream that snaked around Casita and into the valley.

"Mirabel," he started, not really knowing how he was going to end the sentence.

"I'll be fine," Mirabel asserted, miserable. She bowed her head to allow more unruly than usual curls to cover her face. Her hands clenched tightly around her forearms. Bruno took a step away. And then another.

"I'm just going to…" He trailed off.

"Yep," Mirabel choked.

"Right." Bruno said, stealing around the corner and walking quickly in the opposite direction.

Coward, he thought.

What was the point of coming back if you're not there when your family needs you?

So Bruno went to Julieta- because when his back was at the wall, he always went to Julieta.

He found her in the kitchen, working a large bowl of masa with her palm and humming Salsipuedes to herself. He paused in the doorway a moment, soaking in the first wisps of sunlight glinting off the kitchen's yellow tiles. Salsipuedes, tierra de amor, salsipuedes, por ti soñé - one of the older generation's favorites, though the meaning of the word itself had been lost to the isolated village. A large pot of cuchuco bubbled on the stove, the smell of charred herbs and peppers filling the air. It was about an hour before the family usually took breakfast.

Bruno had missed her, he realized. He hadn't seen much of his family lately by choice. Guilt darkened the edges of the moment. Perhaps Julieta sensed it, because she glanced over her shoulder to find him lingering in the doorway. Her eyes widened a fraction. Then she turned around in the opposite direction with an open countenance. Decades of practice.

"Hungry?" she asked, putting aside the bowl and wiping her hands on the dish cloth tucked into her apron.

Bruno nodded and slid into one of the chairs at the chipped green table in the center of the kitchen. Not really, but it made as good a reason to emerge as any.

Julieta began to hum again and grabbed a handful of masa, rolling it between her palms and placing it on the cast iron stove. She cracked an egg next to it and plucked a sprig of cilantro from her windowsill herbarium to sprinkle over the top. She was taking pains, cooking a breakfast just for him. Bruno felt absolutely horrible for his behavior the past months.

He cleared his throat, preparing to say what he came to ask her.

"So how've you been?"

It wasn't what he wanted to ask. Julieta probably knew it. She paused in her cooking to give him a patient, just a bit withering glance, before carrying on.

"Fine, given everything. And yourself?"

Julieta flipped the egg with a spatula and patted it down for a second before transferring it to a plate that Casita rolled down from the cupboards.

"Great," he responded, grabbing his arm. "I mean, fine."

As the pause lengthened, he wished he'd brought one of the rats with him. Something to do with his hands. Julieta, to her credit, didn't goad him. But she must have known he didn't show himself to exchange pleasantries.

'Ah, and is the family doing okay?" Bruno added.

"Mostly," said Julieta. "It's tough."

Duh.

"Just checking," he said, folding and refolding his fingers nervously in front of him. He recalled the sight of Mirabel tucked behind Casita, clutching her own arms like she was holding herself from flying apart by force of will. "Has Mirabel in particular seemed okay to you? I mean, given everything, like you said."

Julieta continued to poke at the masa and the egg for a second, as if she hadn't heard him. Then she heaved a deep sigh and turned from the stove.

"She seems fine," Julieta said with emphasis on "seems." She grabbed her apron strings and twisted them between her fingers, a childhood tell. "She has been so helpful keeping things running now that Abuela's gone…"

Bruno nodded. It checked out.

"Abuela would have been proud," he guessed. "Seeing all that training pay off. Huh?"

Bruno remembered the years of Abuela transitioning Mirabel into the role of organizing and moral center of the village. It hadn't always been pleasant for either of them.

"She's doing great."

Julieta retied and tucked her apron strings away, definitively.

There was a tense pause. Mirabel hadn't seemed that great to Bruno, but he wasn't supposed to see that. He took a moment to look at his sister more closely, examining the edges that unraveled around her appearance. A couple of extra hairs out of place, a few more lines around her eyes than he remembered. Abuela's loss had taken a toll on all of them, especially those who others came to for support. Julieta had Luisa, Isabella, Mirabel, and an entire village worth of ails to heal.

"Do you think-" Bruno began.

"She won't talk to me!" Julieta blurted, a clatter of spatula against the kitchen counters causing both of them to jump. Then, she walked back her frustration, smoothing over the outburst with more bustling around the kitchen.

"Skipping meals, avoiding me and Agustin … You know how these young ones are."

Julieta moved the bowl of masa she had bene kneading to the table, and then changed her mind and moved it back. She was on a tear.

"Loss is so new to them. I don't think they know how to deal with it. And they are just old enough that they don't confide in their mothers, huh?

"We could tell them, if they'd listen. Remember when we were their age and- Miercoles!"

The last statement was directed to the masa on the stove which had started to smoke. When she turned it over, the bottom had blackened. She tossed it into a basket of compost, grumbling to herself about the waste.

"I remember," Bruno was forced to admit.

It was about when he started to fall out of favor with the village and the family, lost his last of his childhood friends. Not so young and cute anymore, still telling the future in the least tactful way possible. Julieta was right that the young people in the village had never experienced the loss of someone so integral as Alma. Death seemed to have pervaded his own generation's entire life- the shadow of Pedro's sacrifice over the Encanto. But to this new generation, especially with Julieta's healing powers, death had been forestalled for decades.

For all of his sister's strength and emotional acumen, Bruno didn't envy her position.

Julieta deliberately formed a new handful of masa and placed it on the stove. The only sound in the room was the sizzle of the oil and the clinking of her spatula.

Like Mirabel, he had fought for his place in the Encanto. He had struggled to not let his family down, justify the loss of Pedro with his own success. Unlike Mirabel, he'd eventually lost.

Bruno's resolve grew. He couldn't take care of the entire family the way his mother had, or the way Julieta did for her daughters. But surely he could help the one? Bruno stewed in his uncertainty. It was one thing to help Mirabel by vanishing for a decade, and another altogether to remain.

Finally, Julieta handed him a sopa that she had dressed handsomely with salsa, guacamole and a fried egg. Bruno accepted the emotional entreaty on a plate.

"Could you look after her?" Julieta asked. "You're her favorite, you know."

Bruno shrugged, surprised. Uneasy at the title if he was honest. It wouldn't be the first time that Julieta revealed some insight about Bruno that he didn't already know himself.

But he couldn't refuse her request. He already intended to do so.